You can't rush reality
Archive for April, 2010
Paul on The Death of Type O Negative’s Peter Steele…plus, Revisiting How to Kill Addiction
Apr 22nd
On April 13 the lead singer of Type O Negative, Peter Steele, died from heart failure at 48 years old. His music was a combination of the morose Gothic and aggressive heavy metal – a mixture of two ardently sincere music styles that together equaled pure deadpan comedy. Steel went from a NYC garbage man to a rock god. Much was made of his dramatic appearance, he was an intimidating 6’7,” long black hair and had the vampirish good looks that now bring Robert Patterson to mind. And like Robert Patterson, women threw themselves at Steele. But while Patterson can go on and on about his uneasiness in his role as a sex symbol, Steele, who admitted similar insecurity, posed nude and erect for “Playgirl.” In appearances on Jerry Springer and Ricky Lake, Peter Steele was able to out-spectacle the spectacle of his fame in a way not many have been able to pull off….with pure humor and charm. In a recent interview, Steele spoke very candidly about the costs that come with hard living – how he he’d struggled with drugs and alcohol, how his family had staged an intervention that landed him in jail and how he’d never forgive them for the betrayal. He talked about what it was like weaning himself off drugs gradually, and how on the (now rare) mornings after a night of partying he’d wake up feeling ashamed, like some of his life had been taken from him. Finally, he discussed recently adopting Roman Catholicism as a way of coming to terms with death. Somewhat fittingly, this all coincides with another news story about a church in Oklahoma where the parishioners stopped going to mass because they saw what looked like a giant penis and balls in the distended stomach muscles of a painted Jesus icon. Another absurd story on top of a church-wide sex scandal that is day-by-day becoming more and more a spectacle. In some way this story reminds me of Steele’s career and personal struggles because it so poetically combines truth, tragedy and absurdity. Steele once said, “If they weren’t laughing with me, okay; if they want to laugh at me, it’s better than nothing.”
RIP Peter Steele. You were killin’ it.
Paul on March Madness…Plus, revisiting the first ever “Killin’ It with Paul Crik” video, on FEAR itself
Apr 9th
If you were part of the annual American television watching tradition known as “March Madness,” you got to experience one of the more exciting and hyped final games of recent memory. The billing on the arena read, “David v Goliath” as tiny new-comer Butler took on old powerhouse Duke. Just about everyone was tossing around references to the movie Hoosiers, in which a local Indiana boy takes a small Indiana high school to the vaunted state championship against a large school. Butler University’s Hinkle Fieldhouse hosted a final game for actual 1954 Milan Basketball team, whose championship season inspired the movie Hoosiers. What’s more, the 1986 movie’s final game was filmed in the exact same fieldhouse at Butler. The comparison is alluring and also reveals something much deeper than simply “rooting for the little guy.”
When game-day arrived on April 5, people wanted to see reality mirror Hoosiers in every way. No one wanted to talk about how the game might end up like the movie at all, or might even be better than the movie. All hopes rested in seeing the virtual fantasy of the movie play out before their eyes.
In the end Butler lost by a couple inches of ball bounce, and everyone groaned about what ‘almost was’. Even though something real did actually happen, people could only grasp it in terms of how close it came to their virtual expectation. If Butler had indeed won, millions would have experienced a deep satisfaction. Why? Because what we really want is for the virtual to be real.
So if you found yourself wondering aloud how a man could fall in love with his avatar, ask yourself how good you would have felt if Butler had won. Killin’ It is knowing the difference between the two is only a matter of technology and time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoosiers
Paul on Genies, Sorcerers, and Bees… Plus, Love 2.0
Apr 6th
Last November, thousands of online viewers witnessed the wedding of Sal 9000 and Nene Anegasaki. Sal 9000 is a 27 year-old resident of Tokyo, Japan and Nene Anegasaki exists in an online game. Love, an elusive emotion pondered by poets, philosophers, fortune-tellers and songwriters throughout the millennia, has been re-engineered by a computer programmer. Love Plus for Nintendo DS is a game that allows players to interact with three different avatars in hopes of getting one to fall in love. Once this has been accomplished, players must then increase interaction to keep their avatar lover interested. The more players interact with their avatar, the more attention is required to maintain the relationship. This investment caused Sal to fall in love with his avatar and now he claims he would not leave her for a real woman.
As humans it seems we’re all programmed to love, but as society has developed we’ve done it in different ways. For example, it was well into the middle-ages before the idea of marriage by consent was established in Europe. Before that, marriage was simply a mutually beneficial arrangement between families, not between two willing parties.
In contemporary culture, the pressure to find your “soul mate” is likely contributing to both the high divorce rate and the use of computer software/websites like eharmony.com to find a compatible match. Couple this with overpopulation and the ability to fertilize eggs outside the uterus and you’ve created an environment where a marriage between a human and an online avatar might be the best evolutionarily model.
While we may need to upgrade our own “software” in order to accept this changed view of marriage, I predict the hardware is going to have no trouble keeping up. The popularity of the newly launched iPad portends that computers aware of their and our simultaneous existence (the iPad knows when it’s being flipped and tipped etc.) might soon be the norm. If love is too strong a word at this point, you might at least grant that there is a mutual appreciation developing here. (>wink<) Killin it!
